Well, it's a complex subject. To GDG's points, I organize my pictures into directories the way I want to, not the way Lightroom would. Except for, I let Lightroom keep all its catalog goo in Pictures/Lightroom. Also, like you, my full repertoire won't fit on my laptop's tiny little SSD, so I carry around an outboard drive, except for one directory "Current" on the main disk where I keep the last two or three months' worth.
Via the magic of symbolic links (more wizened-unix-geek voodoo) the directory layout looks the same on both machines. So rsync does exactly what I think most people would want, and the folder paths in the database don't get bollixed up. Except for... Lightroom doesn't actually handle symbolic links that well. Despite the fact that the pictures look like they're in Pictures/2011/2011-07/whatever, Lr notices that one of those steps is a symbolic link to an external device and shows the folders as being on another device, in Library view. The consequence is that when I rsync, Lightroom opens the catalog correctly and all the filtering works, but if I want to open up a picture it says "oops, can't find the picture". But that turns out to be OK, because there's a "Find pictures" thing and it takes about 2 clicks to say "There they are". Arguably a bug in Lightroom, but no biggie. And anyhow I'm nearly always working on pictures in "Current", which is the same on both machines so no problem at all. Anyhow, I guess my claim remains that there are quite a few situations in which rsync works really well. But as I said, really only suitable for someone who's comfortable typing shell commands into a terminal window -T On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 5:39 AM, Bruce Walker <[email protected]> wrote: >> As far as I understand it, in broad strokes, Rick wants to "copy"/"sync" his >> LR catalog from his workstation to his more portable laptop, do some work >> there on the laptop, then "copy"/"sync" his work back to his workstation. He >> expects any changes he made on the laptop to be 100% reflected on the >> workstation. >> >> The rsync solution Tim describes should accomplish this. Plus it's *really* >> fast. > > It's not that simple. The problem is that if you rsync (or ChronoSync) > the catalog file from one machine to another, the folder paths in the > database can be incorrect. Only if they are organized in such a way > that the folder paths are a relative subdirectory of the catalog > folder do they always work correctly. > > There are assumptions in Tim's document which are valid only if your > Lightroom setup is only using the default organization of catalog > folder and image file folders. I don't store either of them in the > default locations ... there's no need to and it's safer not to. > > And then there's the notion that Rick wants to reorganize a subset of > his catalog ... there might not be enough space on his laptop to hold > the entire library. I have this issue myself: my laptop has a 500G > disk in it, my working image file repository *alone* is 900G at this > point, never mind OS, applications, other files, and necessary free > space. > > Synchronization tools are very useful ... I use ChronoSync every day > to maintain my archives ... but they do not do what is needed for > Rick's project. > -- > Godfrey > godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
